“... a tang of truth but not too much overt significance. The name Moyra Grabham he thought had ‘a little too much meaning’ to be used in The Ivory Tower. Even James had his Archers and his Goodwoods early in his career, though, and listed ‘Remnant’ and ‘Masterman’ in his notebooks as potentially useful names when he found them in the Times. Jane ...”

“... Asher Silberman issued a stinging rebuttal of the minimalist stance in 2006. David may have been little more than a hilltop chieftain, but contrary to the minimalists, the discovery in 1993 of a ninth-century BCE Aramaic victory inscription referring to a royal ‘House of David’ leaves little doubt that he was a real ...”

“... is a mass of detail about the couple’s wardrobes, both fashionable and functional: I like the little twist about Margherita’s favourite pair of gloves, ‘double kid bordered with gold thread’, and how she probably gave up wearing them after 1388, when a new Florentine law decreed that prostitutes had to wear gloves. Another favourite topic is ...”

“... famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers, it ventriloquises Barthes’s late style of ‘biographical ...”

“... vignettes of poverty, endless movement around the same small nexus of streets, the Village, Little Italy. He was ‘God’s spy’, a poet fink keeping secret notebooks. The early poems are about his mother and the sea, their correspondence: ‘The sea ate her / Upon the shore I found a strange / yet beautiful food.’ Or about gangsters, death ...”

“... their father’s permission was needed and he was reluctant to give it. In her diary Vera ascribed Arthur Brittain’s opposition to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I ...”

“... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”

“... its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to set up the alliance began at the Pentagon just five days after the Treaty of Brussels was signed in March 1948, leading to plans known as the ...”

“... banner of the Sinn Féin party – founded earlier in the century by the non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the December 1918 General Election. Assembling in Dublin on 19 January 1919, those elected members not ...”

“... Pantagruel ought not to be set down as nothing.’ Rabelais loved his glass of piot – there is little reason for believing that the draughts of wine are always allegories of higher things – but when Hazlitt conjured up a picture of Rabelais set among his wine-flagons he also thought of him ‘with his books of law, of school divinity and physic before ...”

“... Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this is a feeling for clarity itself as a kind of mystery, and for the lyrical as a gentle shock. Here’s ...”

“... years of no histories, and at the end, effectively, of the Western empire itself. Ammianus is a little ‘wobbly’, as Burrow puts it, on high politics, but good on Rome’s low life, gaming and gossiping in theatre doorways, and on its rich, who were anxious to be recorded as serving the biggest fish and roast dormice in town. He was sympathetic to the ...”

“... experiences. ‘They’re young. They’re in love. They rob banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free ...”

“... interpret the feverish speculation it unleashed on social media? A minute or two in this cramped little space up in the air, between floors. It’s the kind of thing that’s often dismissed as trivial gossip, not something that should matter to us. But that would be to miss the point entirely about what we used to call the zeitgeist, and Solange Piaget ...”